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More TV equals fewer babies?

How to solve India’s population problem: Supply every village with electricity so that every villager will watch more television late at night and have less sex.

Huh?

This is the brainchild of India’s new health and welfare minister.

Let’s all think about this one for a minute.

I know firsthand how overpopulation can ruin good things in India. Build a school and a year later, you gotta build another one because there are that many more kids. India is slated to become the world’s most populous nation by 2050 with a population of a whopping 1.7 billion.

But watching television seems a peculiar way to tackle this problem. Might it be better to educate people instead? So that they understand the consequences of having too many children? So that the children they do have can grow up and work decent jobs?

In any case, Indian television has plenty of sexy stuff on air. Wouldn’t that spur people into babymaking activities?

Think about it and let me know if you think this idea, birthed on World Population Day, has any merit.

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Another one rides the bus


Finally. Someone in my beloved hometown came up with a brilliant idea: a bus tour of Kolkata.

That may seem like a given to us here in America. We’ve all been on the duck tours of various cities or climbed to the top of a double decker for a tour along the Thames or boarded a bateau along the Seine. But there seems to be a dearth of organized tours in places that need them the most. And I put Kolkata at the top of the list.

Chaotic. Disorganized. A maze of human congestion.

No map can be of service. No GPS can possibly see every unnamed, snaking lane.

This is a city where directions are given thusly: You get off the main road, then go a few blocks. You will see Annapurna Sweets on the right and immediately after, there is a small lane. Take that until you see a house with blue window grills and turn left. Then stop at the corner snack stall and ask for Rajada. Hop on a rickshaw with him and he will bring you to our house. Third floor, West-facing. It will say Chatterjee on the mailbox.

Ooof, as goes the Bengali expression for frustration.

And this is a city foreigners are supposed to navigate? A city where even my 84-year-old aunt gets lost (and not because her memory is failing, either).

There are no street signs. Only cows and taxis and buses and rickhsaws and stray dogs and people. And people. And people. And cars. And cars. It took me three hours to travel four miles once. This is not a city where walks are pleasant.

My husband, Kevin, got ripped off in a taxi in New Delhi once. The man travelled less than a mile and was charged for 10 times that. And Delhi has street signs. Sort of.

Do you see where I am going with the moral of this story?

India is an unforgiving place for foreigners. Not only are most cities unnavigable but you can’t trust a soul to take you where you want to go without shelling the big buckeroos. Or rupees, in this case.

So, finally.

The government of West Bengal has come up with the idea of a government-guided tour of the city I so dearly love.

“The non-AC bus, which took streetchildren on a joyride on Monday, will start from the department of tourism office on Shakespeare Sarani daily at 8am. For a Rs 200 ticket (minus food), it will take passengers as far as Belur Math and Dakshineswar temple while covering routine city spots like Indian Museum and Mother House,” says the poorly-phrased Telegraph story. Mother House, of course, refers to Mother Theresa.

Key wording here: “non-AC.” Beware the “Oh Calcutta” heat. But at least the bus will take you from place to place without worries of getting lost or being penniless. All for Rs. 200. That’s less than $5, y’all.

Why it took so long for this brilliant idea, I do not know. But I have a feeling other big changes are in store for my hometown. More on that later.

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Cows, goats, Chelsea, oh my

This morning, I interviewed a Kenyan man who is offering 40 goats and 20 cows in dowry for Chelsea Clinton’s hand in marriage. She would be wife no. 2 — he married a college mate, Grace, in 2006, while waiting for a response from the Clintons to his initial offer back on 2000. The dowry has remained the same. And, of course, Kenya allows polygamy.

At a Nairobi town hall session, moderator Fareed Zakaria joked with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that the offer of mariage from Godwin Kipkemoi Chepkurgur was not a bad one, given the global recession and all.

Hillary responded by saying Chelsea was her own woman.

Chepkurgur told me he remains hopeful, his admiration for the Clintons rather gushing. I certainly wasn’t going to be the one to burst his bubble. But I have a feeling Chelsea is simply not interested. Goats and cows aside.

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The water has come

Once again, thousands of Indians have been affected by flooding in the monsoon season. It’s become a regular sight to us, and we saw it here in America in the aftermath of Katrina. But few of us can imagine the forceful nature of water as enemy.

I remember my father’s aunt putting her bed up on bricks, stacked four high. She lived in Bangur, a northern, low-lying Kolkata neighborhood prone to flooding. It was expected that the outside would invade as the standing water on the streets inched upward. With it came snakes, creepy insects, garbage, disease. “Badi-te jol eshecche,” my great aunt would say. “The water has come to the house.”

We planned our lives around the water — we knew the streets that were still navigable by car and foot and we knew the ones to avoid.

The smell of mold hung heavy in every house. Without electricity to run fans, we sat in darkness, the sweat trickling from our heads all the way down our backs. We’d pray for more rain because with it came a breeze in the stillness of an oppressive afternoon.

Now, I get upset if one fly has illegally entered my house. I run about trying to swat the nuisance. I begin to panic if the power goes off for more than an hour at a time.

How lucky we are that we can lock out the heat and stave off the water — that we have so much power over nature’s fury.

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Farewell to Basra

The British are fully withdrawing from Iraq today, leaving a legacy, for the second time in a century.

They were occupiers of Iraq once before, after World War I; their dead lie still in a north Baghdad cemetery.

Now they leave 179 more dead. Their legacy this time: Basra, the southern port city and Iraq’s second most populous after Baghdad. The British, of course, have been stationed in southern Iraq, mainly in Basra, since the war began in 2003.

A lot has transpired in Basra since I last saw it in 2003 — a coalition forces “success story” that turned to utter madness under the grip of militant Shiite militias.

AJC photographer Bita Honarvar and I were there, in the last few days of our trip, drained by heat and war. We saw a baby born with its brain outside its skull. The Iraqis blamed it on the use of depleted uranium by the Americans. We did not know exactly why the baby was so deformed. All we knew is that it would not survive.

We survived on crackers and vegetarian MREs, given to us in Baghdad by 3rd Infantry Division boys. Cheese tortellini has never tasted that great again.

I remember going up to the rooftop of our hotel, where the balmy breeze off the Shatt al-Arab smacked our cheeks and blew our hair. The air smelled of the sea, so close is Basra to the Persian Gulf.

We watched day turn into night. Iran emerged before us, the lights of villages and towns twinkling before us like perfect Harry Winston diamonds.

Bita’s father, Samad, grew up here. In Abadan. I believe this was the closest she had ever been.

From all accounts, life along the mighty river, a convergence of the Tigris and Euphrates, has re-ignited. There are now parks and cafes open where Iraqis can take their families to cool off and relax.

But back then, we only had one comfort — Iraq’s famously creamy ice- cream. It was a good thing our fixer knew where to find it among the despair.

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After the ceremony

After the military ceremony, after the body comes home quietly, unseen by most of the world, after the remains forever join the earth — that’s when the suffering surfaces in ways too cruel for most of us to imagine.

I wrote in my last entry about the wretched July days of 2005 when the Army National Guard brigade I was embedded with lost eight men within a week. In al, 11 died in 11 days. Before that ugly summer finally turned cooler, more young Georgia men gave their lives in Iraq.

I covered so many of those memorials. Editors encouraged new ways to tell tales of grief. They worried the stories were all starting to sound the same. Stale.

The public salutes its heroes, then promptly goes back to leading their own lives leaving mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, sons and daughters to carry their pain in solitude. At a kitchen table at sunrise. On a long drive down a snaking country road, tall pines whispering in the night. At picnics. At shopping malls. In offices. The loss is always there.

So are lingering questions. How did he die? Did he suffer? Was it quick? Who was with him when he took his final breath? And the more difficult questions: Why?

Over the years, I have become acquainted with soldier families who suffered this acute loss. From mothers who cannot accept their only child will never return home to fathers who are adamant that their son’s death was not in vain. I spent hours with them, getting to know the intricacies of lives that are twisted and mangled forever.

I spoke with Jeff Brunson yesterday. He is the father of one of the four soldiers who died when I first arrived at Camp Striker on that blazing July day in 2005. I’ve written several times about Jeff for the newspaper –I followed him when he went to see Gus’s portrait at the Museum of Patriotism. Jeff looked into his son’s piercing blue eyes and wiped tears that fell from his own. I stood with Jeff in a Snellville drizzle and watched how among anti-war protesters, he stood proud and self-assured that his son did the right thing for his country.

I am not sure why, but Jeff and I keep in touch. He is a humble man of modest means. He volunteers at the botanical gardens in Athens and sells produce to make a living. He told me he sold 250 watermelons and 100 cantaloupes on July 4.

I visited Jeff once at his house in Bogart. We sat outside, drank sweet tea and talked about everything but Gus. But I could tell his son was there, in every word, every thought. When I got up to leave, he grabbed my arm and asked me what I knew.

In that awkward moment, I did not know what to say. I did not know if he knew details, though I suspected he did. He told me the military advised him not to open the coffin.

Jeff’s son’s battalion is now in Afghanistan. I wonder if Gus would still be a citizen soldier had he survived Iraq. But mostly, I wonder how Jeff Brunson musters the strength to carry on. And whether that awful weight of sadness will ever be lifted. Whether he will ever smile again the way he did in a treasured photo he showed me of father and son. Together.

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A wretched anniversary


It’s been four years since AJC photo journalist Bita Honarvar and I took a C-130 military transport from the safety of Kuwait into the horrors of Iraq.

We were just starting an assignment to cover the Georgia Army National Guard’s 48th Infantry Brigade. It was my first trip to Iraq as an embed – I had never been exposed to the conflict through an American soldier’s lens.

Within hours after arrival at our dusty two-person tent at Camp Striker, adjacent to Baghdad’s airport, I stumbled upon the worst news possible: The brigade had just suffered its first four combat casualties.

Later, I would discover they had died in gruesome fashion.

The last of a three-Humvee convoy rolled over a 600-pound bomb hidden in the road. The military calls such bombs “improvised explosive devices” or IEDs. But to me, there is no other word for a bomb that kills with such precision, such ease.

All four men in that Humvee were alive one moment, oblivious of their fate. Within seconds, they were gone.

Staff Sgt. Carl Fuller
Sgt. James Kinlow
Sgt. John Thomas
Spc. Jacques “Gus” Brunson

They were members of Alpha Company, 2nd Battalion, 121st Infantry Regiment. I had watched them train in the winter, among the tall pines of Fort Stewart, just outside of Savannah. I had watched them train in the unforgiving Mojave Desert, in camps and terrain designed to simulate Iraq.

They had practiced so hard for war, yet in the end, they never had a fair chance. They never got to fire back at the enemy.
My first Iraq story for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that summer was about the four men and their memorial.

The commanders made it clear that reporters were to stay away from the traumatized men. I didn’t know how I could talk to them. I wanted to tell their story. What does it feel like to bunk with a man one night and stare at an empty cot the next? Do you wonder how much they suffered? Do you fear it will happen to you? How do the days pass without their laughter; without their friendship? How do you find the strength to carry on?

On my second day, I stumbled across two of the soldiers from that unit in the Striker PX. We struck up a conversation in the checkout line. Later that night, Spc. Shane Parham, a “country boy” from Social Circle (pictured here with an Iraqi boy) came by to speak to Bita and me.

I believe he found the company of women comforting; he knew we would not judge him or think him weak. He could let his guard down in front of us and not have to act the macho infantryman that he was trained to be.

We fought tears as we listened to what he had witnessed. He was part of the body recovery crew. He had seen what no man should ever have to see.

Suffice it to say that parts of the Humvee and the equipment the soldiers carried that day were strewn about the fields and ditches of southwest Baghdad. I know because I saw them every time I went out on a mission with 48th soldiers. Part of a helmet; a Gerber knife, pieces of Army green Humvee seats. My heart raced and I feared the worst as we drove up Route Red Sox, the name the soldiers attached to the dirt road lined with canals, ditches and thick clumps of papyrus and bamboo.

I have my notebooks from my conversation with Shane – two steno pads filled with a soldier’s words. Hardly any ever appeared in print. I knew that his emotions were raw. I chose to respect him in this terrible moment of overpowering grief and anger. I knew I could learn from him.

Bita and I covered the memorial service. It was my first for a soldier who died at war.

I was taken with the ceremony. There’s something very powerful about an empty pair of desert boots, upended rifles with helmets slung over them. Dog tags belonging to the dead, dangling on the stage as if so say: Don’t ever forget my name.

And then, the unthinkable happened: Four more from the same company, the same platoon, were dead. They were also in the last vehicle of a three-Humvee convoy and rolled over a hidden bomb.

The men and women at Striker trembled openly. They withdrew to their tents; spoke in whispers.

Killed in action:
Spc. Jonathon Haggin
Staff Sgt. David Jones
Sgt. 1st Class Victor Anderson
Sgt. Ronnie Shelley

Shane took me to see the guys in Alpha Company. I will never forget walking into the 16-man tent to see the eight empty cots. The survivors, sat with heads bowed, trying to find the right words to tell a reporter. It was as horrifying as anything else I had witnessed: mass graves, earthquake victims, executions.

I see people on Atlanta roads who have yellow ribbons plastered on their cars. Support the troops, they say.

I wonder how many of those people really know what some of these men have been through. Going to war may be heroic and patriotic. It may even be honorable sometimes. But it is never glorious.

My real understanding of what U.S. soldiers experienced in Iraq began on that July day four years ago.

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Taxi!


We’re used to bandhs in Kolkata. Bandh means close or stop in Hindi and usually refers to a labor strike of some sort. Kolkata, of course, is the heartbeat of West Bengal state, ruled by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) for more than three decades. The communists like labor strikes and we have plenty of them in my beloved hometown.

The latest has not so much to do with politics but the environment.

The operators of private buses and taxis have gone on strike to protest a government order to ban commercial vehicles more than 15 years old. It’s a pollution-curbing measure in a city where children grow up never knowing blue skies and where nails and nostrils turn black with a walk of a few city blocks.

I am glad the government is finally thinking of pollution. Kolkata is already unbearable in its sweltering heat and humidity that makes the walls peel. Then there’s 18 million people fighting for inches of space.

The dust coupled with pollution makes it tough for non-Kolkatans to enjoy the city.

But with the ban on smoke-spewing vehicles slated to take effect on Aug. 1, 60,000 taxis and 10,000 buses are standing idle. Hordes of people have no way to get from place to place.

One doctor who still makes house calls told the BBC that he could not get to his ailing patients.

I, for one, cannot imagine Kolkata without its taxis – some black and yellow, others, plain yellow, all rickety, grimy, aging Ambassadors. They bounce down pot-holed streets and wreak heavily either of cheap incense or the driver’s fast-burning bidi.

Taxis are everywhere in Kolkata. And quite affordable for the middle classes.

The drivers say they cannot afford to buy new vehicles and switch from diesel to greener fuels. Nor can they seem to get loans in the economic downturn.

Such are the dilemmas of living in a poor nation.

I’m not sure what the solution is. I shudder to think what Kolkata would look like without pollution controls. But nor can I imagine standing on a congested corner, perhaps on Ballygunj Circular Road and Gariahat Road, and yelling: “Taxi!”

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Night and day

I once witnessed a total eclipse of the sun. I can’t recall the year — just that I was young. And that I was home in India.

It was supposed to happen at midday. All of Kolkata was abuzz. We went and bought our eclipse-watching goggles and waited with the kind of anticipation that could rival a bride’s as she walks down the aisle.

But in India, solar eclipses are the stuff of superstition. Pregnant women stay indoors for fear of giving birth to a tainted baby. Temples close. Somehow, the sun’s light disappearing is cause for much concern.

And eerie it was. When there should have been skin-burning rays, darkness fell upon the congested city of millions. When there should have been bustling markets and overflowing buses, there was emptiness. Day became night. We ran to the rooftop of my grandfather’s house to catch a glimpse of the sun’s corona.

Miraculous, it was. The sun appeared like a crescent moon, a silvery sliver high in the sky.

I helped put together CNN’s story on the longest solar eclipse of the 21st century, first seen on Wednesday in eastern India. I wondered if my friends and family were out on rooftops, just like I had been, marveling at the celestial spectacle.

Check it out: http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/07/22/solar.eclipse/index.html

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Living in space

Kevin left for a two-week road trip today. I woke up to an empty house. Made me think about how much space we are used to having in our American lives of comfort.

My mother’s family in Kolkata live humbly, even by Indian standards — in dilapidated rented homes, without running hot water or modern bathroom facilities. My mother’s brother’s family still occupies a once-grand and ancient, the same one in which my mother spent her childhood years. They were times she held onto in adulthood, especially after a massive stroke left her bound to a wheelchair.

The plaster is crumbling; during the monsoon, the rain intrudes. The rooms are tiny. It’s not uncommon for a family of five to inhabit a 400 square foot apartment. Think how it must be for the poor and their burgeoning populations in India’s vast bastis.

The average American house size has more than doubled since the 1950s and now stands at 2,349 square feet. That’s more than any other country in the world.

I am sipping my coffee and feeling alone in my Victorian space. And feeling guilty that I should have the privilege of feeling so.